Patrick Melrose, Volume 1: Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope Audiobook By Edward St. Aubyn cover art

Patrick Melrose, Volume 1: Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope

Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope

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Patrick Melrose, Volume 1: Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope

By: Edward St. Aubyn
Narrated by: Alex Jennings
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About this listen

Read by actor Alex Jennings, Patrick Melrose Volume 1 contains the first three novels in Edward St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical series, filmed for Sky Atlantic and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as aristocratic addict, Patrick.

Moving from Provence to New York to Gloucestershire, from the savageries of a childhood with a cruel father and an alcoholic mother to an adulthood fraught with addiction, Patrick Melrose is on a mission to escape himself.

But the drugs don’t make him forget his past, and the glittering parties offer him no redemption . . .

Searingly funny and deeply humane, Patrick Melrose Volume 1 contains the first three novels in the Patrick Melrose series, Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope. Patrick Melrose Volume 2 is also available, containing the final two novels in the series, Mother’s Milk and At Last.

©Edward St Aubyn 2018 (P)2018 Macmillan Digital Audio Biographical Fiction Coming of Age Dark Humor Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-Ins Funny
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Critic reviews

The Melrose sequence is now clearly one of the major achievements of contemporary British fiction. Stingingly well-written and exhilaratingly funny (David Sexton)

Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation (Alan Hollinghurst)

St Aubyn puts an entire family under a microscope, laying bare all its painful, unavoidable complexities. At once epic and intimate, appalling and comic, the novels are masterpieces, each and every one (Maggie O’Farrell)
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one of the best narrators I've heard, with a story at all too late between melodramatic and drawn out through to gripping and deep. Initially feels almost like a soapy, then quickly takes a dive into broader social commentary and sharp observation of life. but gets bogged down around the third quarter, in tracking 1 persons struggle to progress. Overall a story told through vivid characters and engaging, interesting plot. The narrator is awesome which really helps

excellent narration, engaging story

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St. Aubyn can certainly write, and he's able to capture experiences and moods very well. Alex Hemmings narrates brilliantly. But I found the characters and storyline rather tedious. All the characters are from the upper classes, and with one or two exceptions they're pretty insufferable. Many of them seem to be caricatures of snobby upper class English twits, money-obsessed, philistine or flaky Americans, oily Frenchmen, etc.. There is nothing to love in this world, much to despise, and here and there some people one might pity if they did anything other than wallow in their privilege.

FIne prose; superb narration; story a bit tedious

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I could not finish. The repetitiveness of the awful behaviour and luxurious thoughts wore me down.

unbearably self-indulgent characters

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